A Long And Good Read On A Guy That Is Always In Belichicks Ear Bill Belichick has a vitually unknow guy on his staff by the name of Ernie Adams who helps with all situations. Coaches are crazy not to have a similar type coach. Long read but very interesting.
PHOENIX -- You don't notice Ernie Adams at first, but he's always there in his own peculiar way. Walking the halls in the Patriots' complex, lost in his own thoughts, he will often ignore co-workers. In meetings, he has been known to fall asleep. After practice, he is almost always the first person Bill Belichick consults. On game day, he's in the press box with a headset on, running numbers, computing percentages and, some around the league insinuate, overseeing more insidious operations.
Courtesy of Phillips Academy
Ernie Adams' title is director of football research, but don't expect to see a job description .
When Belichick is taking those lonely walks up and down the sideline, his head bowed as if in prayer, you can bet it's Ernie Adams yapping away in Belichick's ear. Some call him the smartest man they've ever met. A longtime NFL watcher compares him to "Q," James Bond's master of espionage and gadgetry. Author David Halberstam called him "Belichick's Belichick." No other team has anyone like him on its payroll. And yet, save for football insiders, he is virtually unknown. In an era of media oversaturation, there is exactly one more picture of Bigfoot on The Associated Press photo wire (two) than there is of Adams (one). And it's of the back of his head.
So here, in the ballroom of the Phoenix Convention Center, just six days before New England will attempt to complete a perfect season that Adams played a significant role in creating, I want to know what the almost-perfect Patriots think about their secret weapon: a guy with thick glasses and the sartorial sensibility of Mister Rogers; a guy who lived with his mother until she died three years ago.
Who, exactly, is Ernie Adams?
"I don't know what his job title is," linebacker Adalius Thomas says. "I didn't even know his last name was Adams."
"Ernie is a bit of a mystery to all of us," offensive tackle Matt Light says. "I'm not sure what Ernie does, but I'm sure whatever it is, he's good at it."
Finally, I approach receiver Wes Welker. "I'm writing a story about Ernie Adams," I tell him.
"Who?" he says.
"The guy who's always with Belichick who doesn't ever really talk."
"Oh," he says, recognition washing over his face. "Ernie."
He thinks for a second. "He's got to be a genius," he says, "because he looks like one."
Courtesy of Phillips Academy, copyright John Hurley 2005
Adams looks -- and thinks -- like an investment banker, but he owns three Super Bowl rings.
THE JOB
This brings us to the million-dollar question: Behind the quirks and the strange attire and the random attacks of sleep, what is it that Ernie Adams, you know, does? Years ago, Modell offered $10,000 to anyone who could tell him. No one could. A few years back, during a team film session, the Patriots players put up a slide of Adams. The caption read: "What does this man do?" Everyone cracked up. But no one knew.
In the broadest definition, Adams seems to be a man who loves to be in the background of greatness. Many things have his fingerprints on them, such as the game plan that engineered the upset of the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI. Yes, Adams and Belichick figured out how to neutralize Marshall Faulk on the plane ride to New Orleans. Adams is involved in a lot of surprising things; he's a kind of "Forrest Gump" of sporting success. Like, say, the best-selling book "Friday Night Lights," which documented high school football, and later became a movie and a television show. That's right. "I'm indebted to him because he really turned me on to Odessa, Texas," says author Buzz Bissinger, who went to Andover with Adams and Belichick.
Adams' contributions to the Patriots begin with film. Hours and hours of film, often in his darkened office. He has been doing this for years, first at Northwestern in the early 1970s, where he convinced coaches to let him go from student-manager to scout. "He was a prodigy," says Rick Venturi, an assistant on that Wildcats team.
By now, after years of evolution, Adams sees film differently. Not just as random actions, but a genealogy of the game of football. When a defender moves, he recalls watching or having read about the first time a defender moved like that, even if it was 50 years ago, and he knows why, which tells him how to counteract the move. He has a photographic memory. Perkins tells a story of Adams' memorizing the Giants' thick playbook. In one night.
So, every week, the Patriots get the kind of analysis that only high-powered hedge funds or, say, NASA can afford. "Nine times out of 10," Bissinger says, "Ernie sees something nobody else sees."
That memory and those hours of studying film make him an unparalleled resource for assistant coaches. Want to know what a team does, and why? Want to know what a team has done on third-and-short in the red zone in the past 10 years on the road? Ask Adams. He'll know.
Adams' reach doesn't stop there. The Patriots are famous for compartmentalizing: The scouts can't watch practice, the game planners don't know who they are going to draft, and so on. But Adams is into everything. During the draft, according to Michael Holley's "Patriot Reign," he's in charge of running through the team's value chart, figuring out who will best fit their needs. This is the perfect assignment for someone who spent several years in the late 1980s as an analyst and trader on Wall Street and, as an investor, is known for spotting profitable trends shockingly early.
Pats owner Robert Kraft, a successful businessman in his own right, discusses economics with Adams. Belichick jokes that he wishes Adams would manage his portfolio. And the roots of the Patriots' insistence on value, and not letting emotion get in the way of sound investments, sound like they might have sprung from the mind of one Ernie Adams. "Warren Buffett and Ernie are actually somewhat similar," Carlisle says. "I have met Warren Buffet. Warren is one of these people who is phenomenally rigorous in his analysis. If there was someone you might associate with Ernie, it is someone who is [also] slightly asocial."
Adams' official title is director of football research, and he does a lot of that, too, trolling the world for things that might offer the slightest advantage. A year or two ago, an Andover teammate ran across an obscure out-of-print book on nonlinear mathematics. He thought Adams might find a use for it, so he mailed it to him. Adams had already read it. Or there's Rutgers statistics professor Harold Sackrowitz, who got a call from Adams a few years back. Adams wanted to talk about some research Sackrowitz had just completed, dealing with how teams try two-point conversions far too often. Adams sent the professor the Patriots' when-to-go-for-two chart, and asked Sackrowitz to tear it apart. Of the 32 NFL teams, the statistician told the New York Times, only the Patriots called.
Here's another example: The academic paper of a Berkeley researcher, referenced in the same Times story, dealt with how teams punt on fourth down far too often. That paper ended up on Belichick's desk. Now, how do you imagine it got there?
On game day, Adams wears a headset in the press box, a direct line to Belichick. Adams advises Belichick on which plays to challenge, and charts trends. "The one thing the Patriots do better than anyone else is they adjust and make halftime adjustments," Sturges says. "Ernie Adams is the guy who does that."
Are there other game-day duties? While it is commonly accepted that most teams try to steal signals, and New England was actually caught in the well-publicized Spygate incident, one former Patriots insider said a videotape of signals wouldn't help the other 31 teams nearly as much because they wouldn't have Ernie Adams there to quickly analyze and process the information.
And, if any of this happens to be true, Adams' love of military history suggests he might see deciphering signals as just part of winning a battle. Friends say he is wildly competitive. "Behind the exterior of a guy who lived with his mother," Bissinger says, "he is a guy who is really savage about winning games."
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE
https://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=adams
